Korean Energy Economic Review ISSN:1599-7057(Print) 에너지경제연구

This paper focuses on three regions of China as the object of study. This study employs a data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to estimate technical efficiency for the strong and weak disposability of pollutants. According to the comparison of technical efficiencies under the two different disposability assumptions, we can know the impact of environmental regulation on technical efficiency and productivity loss. As a result, we know that the impacts of environmental regulation on technical efficiency and productivity loss in the eastern region were much larger than those in the other two regions during the 1994-2007. In details, the productivity loss from environmental regulation in the eastern region was 5.76%, while that was 0.88% in the central region and 0.33% in the western region. It shows that the eastern region was costly for environmental regulations than other regions. In addition, the productivity loss from wastewater was larger than that from SO2 during the period, that is, the cost for wastewater was larger than that from SO2.